FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true.
Every human has a lifetime of direct experience of something that appears in every observable and testable way to be free will. Complex predictions can be accurately made on the assumption of free will's existence.
Neither statement is true of Determinism, which, if it exists, can neither be observed nor tested in any way. Entire generations of scientists claimed otherwise, and their claims were dramatically falsified over the course of the last century. Belief in Determinism is axiomatic, not evidence-based.
To the extent that "true" is a meaningful term, free will is true. It is true in all the ways that gravity is true, and rejecting it involves exactly the same sorts of commitments and actions that rejecting gravity involves: namely, discarding huge portions of one's moment-to-moment experience as fundamentally unreliable, without any compensatory increase in predictive power.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3hr ago
well, between you, @AhhhTheFrench and this in-depth discussion I'm hoping to continue with @jimm, We've now covered all the possible positions on the subject of hypnosis. I'd certainly be interested to see more discussion about the facts of the matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
That escalated quickly. What's the logic here? I don't take it particularly personally, but it seems a bit out of left field.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4hr ago
The drug addicts are on drugs and "have no choice". The rich guy cheating with 8 different mistresses only "feels shame" insofar as he is found out and it affects his status when they play it on the news.
I think both the addict and the rich philanderer have, through their intentional choices, crippled their capacity to feel shame. I don't think this happens automatically; people who haven't intentionally crippled their own capacity for shame continue to feel it. Those who do cripple their capacity for shame in this way have damaged an important part of their own mind, making them less sane in a meaningful sense.
That said, I agree with you personally, and I would never cheat on my wife, but I come on here to exercise the rational part of my brain, not the boyscout part.
I would argue that the boyscout part is a subset of the rational part. Shame is deeply rational. Those who have crippled their capacity for shame are less rational, not more.
Most is not warranted in this day and age, vestigial nonsense, like people who say they won't sit with their back to the door.
Some fears can be vestigial nonsense, depending on the specific environment. Fear itself remains rational, and always will so long as humans survive.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
Shame is a low class cultural marker.
Shame is a human constant in all social classes.
If nothing is a threat to you then you have no shame.
No human has ever or will ever exist in a state where nothing is a threat to them.
The rich and famous certainly have very little of it if it exists at all, mostly just a cultural nod to the lower classes when at that level, and you only feel it in defeat.
For every shameless rich person, I can point to ten drug addicts shitting themselves on a sidewalk without apparent shame. Further, it seems to me that the absence of shame is the marker of defeat, when one is no longer even trying for goodness and virtue.
It is a fear based emotion that only has the power you give it.
This at least is true, as far as it goes. Unfortunately, fear is a necessary and entirely rational response, because there are better states and worse states, and many of the worse states are extremely wretched. Rational fear is a motive force, a protective force. Its absence is a sign of insanity.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
Consider the time immediately before the Russian Revolution. Everyone has a bone to pick with the Tzar. Does the Tzar represent Culture or Counter-culture?
"Socially dominant but clearly on the way out" seems like a coherent social category to me.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. ...Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
It doesn't seem to me that the shaming norms immediately prior to the Sexual Revolution were particularly strict, from a historical perspective. Nor does this comport with my understanding of how revolutions generally work; they generally don't happen when conditions decline past some critical threshold, but rather when things are getting better, but people think they should be getting better faster. Is that not your understanding? In any case, it's hard to believe that 1950s America leaned harder on shame than, say, Puritan America. Why didn't Puritan America result in a Sexual Revolution, under your model?
The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers.
Historically speaking, I do not see the Sexual Revolution being driven by people who had been shamed reaching a critical mass. Rather, what I observe is people who were not being shamed buying into the idea that the shame-enforcement system they were already on the right side of could be dismantled without cost or consequence, that the fences against sexual misconduct were pointless and that tearing them down would have no downsides and only benefits, because We Had Progressed. Without a broad-based commitment to the big lie of Progress and all the "little" lies that supported it, the sexual revolution would not have happened. Without Enlightenment champions like Marx and Freud selling unmoored Utopianism to an Enlightenment society desperately eager to believe them, the sexual revolution doesn't happen.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
Is it culturally formed, or is it culturally deformed? We agree that people can be made to feel shame about things that should not be considered shameful. The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
I'm sure kids aren't born being ashamed of nakedness or of touching their genitals. On the other hand, they aren't ashamed of casual cruelty either; they have to learn that other people exist and to empathize with them, but that doesn't mean that empathy itself is a cultural construction that we can take or leave as we will. I think modesty is similar: you aren't born knowing it, but you learn about it soon enough unless others expend a great deal of effort trying to hide it from you, and even then sooner or later it'll be back.
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine. That pitch has been gradually walked back as the resulting disasters become increasingly undeniable. The relatively slow pace of that walk-back has been, in my view, only achievable through large-scale deceit and the intentional obfuscation of the horrors the Revolution's architects unleashed and refused to recognize.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
We've asked, believe me. It's baked into the back-end, apparently.
Your thesis was tested in the Sexual Revolution, and it seems to me that it's more or less bankrupt at this point. The tide isn't going the other way because Lewis Enthusiasts spammed Lewis quotes. It's going the other way because the results of the Sexual Revolution are so obviously, inescapably, unendurably wretched. You can argue either "Simping Is King Shit" or "It's your turn to swipe left" as much as you like; the percentage of people who not only aren't buying it but who are viscerally appalled by the evident results continues to rise organically and exponentially over time.
Shame is an innate and necessary part of the human mind. It's a warning alarm, and it exists to warn you of the existence of a serious problem. Turning off the alarm doesn't make the problem stop existing.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1d ago
here ya go. He just gave the cliffs notes for the shooting that started the Kenosha riot which Kyle Rittenhouse more or less ended.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
3d ago
We can't control who gets filtered, and the only sign in the new-comment feed that someone is filtered is a small, greyed-out icon. We try to unfilter them as soon as possible, but it's easy to miss and sometimes we do.
He had that great quote about tyrants who do it for the moral reasons, I'll give him that, but that's the entirety of my appreciation.
Among his many other virtues, his prediction of the trajectory of the sexual revolution was pretty on-point as well.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
C.S. Lewis apologists generally don't believe the only escape is death.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4d ago
He's one of my favorite posters of all time, but he ran out of charity and couldn't bring himself to put in the effort necessary to participate here. Neither he nor anyone else paying attention was surprised by the permaban.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
5d ago
This thread might be of interest to you. I'd be happy to elaborate if you have further questions.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
Biden has been enlisting the Kennedy family to disavow one of their own and prop up himself as the ultimate and only possible candidate for Democrats recently, to the point where Bobby Jr.’s own brother has rejected him and has said on record that he will to the best of his ability attempt to persuade his sibling to drop out of the race.
...Why is this news?
Family ties aren't all that strong anywhere, and they certainly aren't that strong in any political dynasty anywhere on either side of the aisle. RFK Jr. is a pretty fringe dude, he has a roughly zero percent chance of actually winning the presidency, and a much higher percent chance of acting as a spoiler against the Democrats.
There is no concievable world where his own family don't prefer Biden to him.
Also, how does "black irish" apply to either biden or the kennedy family?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
yeah, I'd be about the inverse. It's entirely possible that it's just sheer incompetence. Stranger things have happened.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.
If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.
I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
6d ago
I would argue you almost certainly don't need the submarine, and probably don't need 45 of the men.
People do not appreciate how delicate the modern world is, which is why they also do not appreciate how dangerous the culture war is.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7d ago
It’s making a slightly larger fraction of GDP go towards geopolitical goals. I think we’re still getting a decent return on investment.
What is that return, exactly? I will grant you that in terms of direct costs to America, this scenario allows us to purchase dead Russians and destroyed Russian value at an astonishingly cheap price. Why are dead Russians and destroyed Russian value something you want? What is the end-result you believe we are investing in?
Is it regime change? And then what? Do you think a Russian liberal democracy is a likely outcome if only Putin would go away? If so, I think you should explain why this particular democracy-export project is going to end different than the last several. And if not liberal democracy, then what? A different strong-man? A friendlier strongman? When has that worked before? If you were fine with a strongman, why not just accept Putin?
Is it a failed Russian state? And then what? Who gets the nukes? Who gets the arms? Who cleans up the mess? How confident are you that such a mess can be cleaned up?
Is it a Russian state that remains barely functional, but with minimal capacity for power projection? Why would this be a more desirable end-state than a functional Russia that we left alone to dominate Ukraine? Is it the better outcome for Ukraine? Why is gutting a large country preferable to allowing a small country to be stunted?
What is the actual logic? What is the long-term benefit to treating Russia as an enemy, rather than simply leaving them alone?
But how much of the culpability falls on us rather than on the conscriptors, let alone the invaders?
This war was the predicted outcome of our explicit foreign policy choices. The standard rejoinder is that this assessment assumes that only America has agency, but that appears to me to be a thought-terminating cliche. "Provocation" is a coherent concept within international politics, and it doesn't magically lose its coherence when it becomes inconvenient for supporters of American foreign policy. It was predictable, and was in fact predicted, that meddling on Russia's borders would lead to this war in particular. That meddling had no upside that I've ever been able to see. What was the point, and why was it worth it when this was the predictable outcome?
I would take your “Mistakes were Made” bet, because I don’t expect this to escalate in the ways you’re thinking.
My expectation is that Ukraine loses at some point in the next couple years, leaving Russia with a pyrrhic victory, a poorer and less-stable country, and cemented as an explicit enemy of the US for the next few decades at least. Why is this a desirable outcome? What value was secured by doing things this way?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
Putin just woke up one morning and decided he wanted an invasion, and the rest is history.
I watched people predict this war at roughly this time well over a decade ago, so no, I'm pretty sure Putin didn't just wake up one morning and decide he wanted an invasion.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8d ago
You left out the part where once the obvious disaster becomes visible, we clearly recognize that shit is fucked up, but we need to keep sinking resources into the problem because otherwise The Bad Guys Win. Sure, all our efforts up to this point have been squandered when they weren't actively counterproductive, but you don't want to lose, do you? That's quitter talk!
...I appreciate that this, and the post it's replying to, sounds uncharitable, but at some point on the intersection of human failure, incompetence, and hubris, the charity simply runs out. I watched corpses flap in the slipstream of evacuating US aircraft when Afghanistan collapsed, after TWENTY FUCKING YEARS of this bullshit. We've got the documents now that lay out how there never was a plan, how no one involved who mattered in any way was even attempting to win in any meaningful sense, at any point, ever. At some point, you need some basic level of confidence that the people you're talking to are capable of basic pattern recognition.
Calling people who support Ukraine aid "too stupid to vote" is just "boo outgroup", and if the valence was flipped it would probably be considered banworthy.
I would like to argue that "supporting Ukraine" and "writing blank checks to the American foreign policy apparatus" are not equivalent. For an example, the people who argue that we are and should be supplying just enough material to Ukraine to prolong the conflict indefinitely, as this will maximize the death and destruction inflicted upon Russia, with the maximization of death and destruction inflicted upon the Ukrainians being a price they're willing to pay, are not writing a blank check, but rather making a straightforward, coherent cost-benefit analysis. My objection to this latter group is not that they're stupid, but rather that they're straightforwardly, appallingly evil.
There's also the people who aim for total victory through unrestrained escalation with a rival nuclear power, and think we should roll American tanks and aircraft into direct combat with Russia. These people are not stupid like the first group, and not evil like the second group, but rather crazy. I object to these people the least, as their craziness seems likely to be self-punishing in a way the stupidity and evil of the first two groups lack.
Presumably, there's in theory a group that can argue coherently the reasons why our current engagement is going to secure our Sacred Values where the previous several did not, while threading the needle between pointlessly-destructive large-scale attrition as an end unto itself or the threat of a disastrous escalation spiral. I haven't actually seen these people, but I'm ready believe they exist. I think such people would be wrong, given the available evidence, but am open to their arguments should anyone wish to present them.
I disagree that this is "boo outgroup". We are talking about a set of geopolitical actors that have burned down four countries, are currently directly involved in burning down a fifth, and bear considerable responsibility for millions of deaths. At some point, some degree of moral responsibility for all that destruction, death and misery must intrude. Maybe I'm wrong in my assessments, but I don't think so, and at some point people must make their bets and take their chances. This is mine: this shit will not end well, and ten to twenty years from now it will be generally accepted that Mistakes Were Made. I am going to hammer the point because I am confident I am correct. If I'm wrong, I want to learn from it. If I'm right, I don't want the people I'm arguing against to be able to forget it. I think many of the people who discuss this issue are being unbelievably, unacceptably casual about the lives of millions of other humans. I hate them for it, and I find that this hatred cannot be suppressed or masked to any great degree.
If that earns me a ban, so be it, and I'll attempt to modify my behavior in the future.
nope. The only workaround is apparently to just manually empty the filter as often as possible.
More options
Context Copy link